look what we did!Innovations From Polyurethane Manufacturers

At the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season, Astrid Diaz, a Puerto Rico-based architect, announced her plans for a new polyurethane-based modular home. Her designs consist of polyurethane foam walls and a roof, reinforced with a steel frame, then covered with mortar. The homes — which can withstand winds of up to 184 miles per hour — blend in well with the existing architecture of similar structures that populate the island where there was a need for an estimated 75,000 homes in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

As computer processing becomes progressively faster — able to handle larger amounts of data — and our world becomes even more connected, we find ourselves increasingly reliant on the complex and highly expensive computer hardware, housed in server rooms, that keeps it all running.

Providing Ideal Conditions

A dry setting and cool temperature generally provide an ideal operating environment for this equipment. To maintain these optimal conditions, polyurethane often plays an important role.

Temperature Control

You likely already know that PU is an effective and highly scalable insulator. In the form of open-cell, flexible foam, it can be used to...

In response to a demand from audiences for objects and scenery that look real, today prop houses, set designers and costumers are busier than they have been in years. Polyurethane is helping these creative artisans achieve the kind of authenticity on the big screen that movie-going audiences both desire and demand.

A CGI Backlash

For the past few decades, Hollywood has been experiencing a renaissance driven by computer-generated imagery (CGI). As the years have progressed, the technology has grown more and more advanced. Through CGI, it’s now possible to create huge cityscapes, entire worlds and — of course — all...

Could a new form of flexible polyurethane lace provide robots with a sense of touch? Researchers at Cornell University think they may have come up with the next big breakthrough in robotic sensory perception with a kind of webbing they refer to as “optical lace.”

How It’s Made

To create this new form of flexible lace, first engineers must 3D-print a lattice-type structure using polyurethane technology. Next, once the webbing is printed, it is then threaded with more than a dozen sensors along with LED lights to illuminate it. Finally, the entire structure is fitted snugly onto the robot.

As engineers build buildings ever skyward, issues of practicality, come into play. For example, take elevators.

The elevator banks in giant buildings structures are as much of a modern marvel as the skyscrapers they service. Elevators in these buildings and their components must be both well-thought-out and durable. Maybe that is why so many employ the use of polyurethane wheels in their design.

Polyurethane elevator wheels, with their excellent loadbearing properties and shock absorbing qualities, are an ideal choice to stand up to the taxing demands of busy elevator systems.

If you’re one of the 80 percent of students who change their declared major or begin their college careers undeclared, listen up: a future in polyurethane may be right for you. The polyurethane industry is poised for growth over the next few decades and, as mentioned before in this blog, polyurethane is an essential contributor to the U.S. economy in ways that reverberate throughout the supply chain.

There are several options for you to consider as you look to embark upon a viable and rewarding career:

As prosthetics grow ever more advanced — some now with a motorized function capable of grasping, pointing and even holding objects — one question remains: how will these futuristic limbs, which rely on considerable energy, be powered?

A Wearable Supercapacitor

Engineers at the University of Glasgow believe they have created a solution: a kind of electronic skin made from graphene, polyurethane and graphite that can generate and store solar energy for prosthetic devices.

A thin layer of graphene acts as a solar converter, converting sunlight to electrical energy. The polyurethane-graphite composite sits below the graphene, acting as a supercapacitor that...

In the world of renewable wind energy, something big is happening. Really big. Engineers in the city of Zhuzhou in the Hunan province of China have completed delivery of a 13.7 ton 59.5-meter-long wind turbine blade — reported to be the world’s longest made from polyurethane.

The Polyurethane Advantage

The company that manufactured this giant wind turbine blade says that polyurethane has several advantages over traditional materials. Researchers found polyurethane to have better mechanical performance and higher fatigue resistance. They also say it bonds more easily to carbon fiber reinforcements that help the wind turbine blade maintain its structural integrity...

Polyurethane may hold the key to a gripping future for prosthetic hands. Researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology have been hard at work developing polyurethane aerogels – called shape memory polymers or SMPs. When bent, folded or twisted, the aerogels return to their original shape. They are even capable of bending on their own when a stimulus like heat is applied.

A Prosthetic Prototype

To demonstrate the possible application of the aerogel technology, researchers built a model of a prosthetic hand from the SMPs that was capable of mimicking coordinated muscle function. When heat was applied, the fingers...

Imagine a world in which you could control the television simply by tapping on your shirtsleeve. While it may seem like the stuff of science fiction, thanks to polyurethane, the seamless integration of wearable technology into our daily lives is a greater possibility than ever before.

What the industry has taken to calling “e-textiles” are nothing new; however, significant barriers to scaling the technology for broad consumption have remained in place. Until now, e-textiles have been too expensive, too cumbersome and too difficult to maintain, but all of that could soon be changing.